On December 10, 2013, with great interest, I read a day earlier delivered speech that President Barack Obama gave to more than 90 world leaders and tens of thousands of South Africans who gathered to pay their last respects to Nelson Mandela at a memorial service held in Johannesburg, South Africa.

Obama spoke of Mandela as being a “giant of history.” He said that Mandela “… moved a nation towards justice and in the process moved billions around the world.”

After Mandela was released from prison after spending 27 years in confinement, Obama stated “… he (Mandela) would – like Abraham Lincoln – hold his country together when it threatened to break apart. Like America’s Founding Fathers, he would erect a constitutional order to preserve freedom for future generations – a commitment to democracy and rule of law ratified not only by his election, but by his willingness to step down from power after only one term.”

As I strongly suggest in my book What Would Our Founding Fathers Say?: How Our Leaders Have Lost Their Way, if our politician representatives continue to not respond to the ‘common people’s’, wishes, for which our Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution for, by the end of this century we will lose our Democracy and our republic. All because our political representatives, from the president on down, are responding to their own selfish needs and desires, like the political party in which they’re a member – rather than responding to the wishes and needs of all Americans, regardless of their social or economic class, religious or sexual orientation, or their ethnic origin.

While Mandela was held captive for 27 years, he did a lot of reflecting on his situation and what his goals would be when he got out of prison. He was released from confinement when he was 72 years of age, so all of his prescient common truths about life had been manifested and capable of becoming part of his personal reality.

Even though he was in prison, nevertheless, his soul and all of our souls were one and the same, for they all involved the common simple truths of life, which, over time would become manifest in each of our lives.

Those truths, which make up the very fabric of our being, are part of our psyche at the time of our birth. Those precepts to live-by do not flourish and are not immediately available upon birth, but they’re within the psyches of each neonate that are born in this country and around the world. Since these ‘words to live by’ are prescient in nature, the time when they become manifest is dependent upon the babies maturational level. Since Mandela was 72 years of age when he was released from confinement, he had already maintained many ties with the outside world and he wasn’t about to allow his belief in himself and his ideals to be ham strung and prevented from being actualized. That’s because he knew who he was and what he was about; his conclusions did not come from ill founded fantasy, but rather cold hard reality that he experienced daily in prison. He was determined not to be embittered by the horrible conditions and punishment he had to endure, but rather, he made such experiences become the reason why he was going to champion the cause for freedom for all South Africans, rich, poor, black, white, and all colors in between.

We must begin to see the similarities rather than the differences between ourselves and our political representatives, we might be surprised how similar, rather than dissimilar we all are to one another.

If we do that, like Mandela understood and practiced, we too will have dug deep down into our own individual souls (integrities) and in doing so, begin to see how very similar our needs and desires are between and among one another. Armed with that understanding, through empathy and compassion, we can then begin to identify in some very small ways what Mandela daily experienced while in prison, and in that way begin to vociferously insist our representatives more faithfully represent our common interests rather than that of the rich and the powerful. Because, to the extent that the wealthy have the power to influence votes via the lobbyists, the “common” needs of everyday Americans aren’t heard and politically faithfully responded to. Where’s the justice in that?

Because of that kind of discrimination, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, and the middle class will continue to shrink, and with it, our standard of living for all Americans will continues to decline.

Ultimately, if that political situation continues to be stretched, where the rich get richer, the poor will get poorer, and the middle class gets stretched, like a rubber band, eventually our system of government will break, and all hell will break lose; what will result will be a revolution in this country, of immense proportions.

However, before we should act on our anger and outrage, we should begin to do what our Founding Fathers urged us to do, which would be to understand why the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution were written and why they stood the test of time and have been revered the world over.

It is only then that we, as a country, will be able to understand what dire political straights our country is in and what we need to do to correct it, all of which I address in my Founding Fathers’ book.